Casting hollow base bullets. 450229 help please.

[smkummer]

So i cast hollow base bullets for 41 Long colt, Lyman 12 gauge slug and a 58 minie bullet for a muzzle loader. Until the base plug heats up, one gets a lot of rejects but once it does, it’s usually smooth sailing. So I thought. I just got the above mold at a gun show and it’s recommended for cap n ball revolvers. It’s only a 155 grain bullet. I probably cast about 120 slugs to only have about 18 that are usable. The skirt wouldn’t fill out. I tried heating the base plug with a lighter and that maybe worked for 1 good casting. The closest I got to make 3 or 4 good castings in a row was to turn my lee pro 1000 at full setting where it may or may not have cycled on/off. It was so hot the base was glowing like an electric stove. So this mold is new enough to have the air vents.

Any thoughts how I can get it to work? It must have worked at one time or Lyman would not have made it. I first tried really soft stick on wheel weights, then added a bit of harder clip on wheel weights then even put in some 50/50 lead/tin. No help.

[20:1]

Dip your HB stem in your alloy for a few seconds and wipe it off with a cotton cloth before reinserting it in the hot mold. It sounds like your stem cooled down below its point of reuseability and the alloy started hardening as soon as it reached it.

[Forrest r]

I cast with that same mold for a couple years, definitely a balancing act.

I made a wire loop for any all of the lyman and h&g hp/hb pins I use and set it up so that it straddled the pot and held the hp pins in the alloy. Small hp pins got up to temp and stayed there quickly. Those large hb pins like yours would simply stay in the loop/alloy between casts until it finely got up to temp. (alloy 720*/8 to 9bhn).

Hotplate for the mold and loop suspending the hb pin in the alloy.

A lot of fiddling around but the end result was some beautiful hb bullets. I played with them in the 45acp/1911. But they would really shine in the 45acp revolvers with oversized cylinder holes.

That mold might say 450xxx but it cast a .451"/.452" bullet

[smkummer]

Thanks guys. I’ll try the Lyman ladle next time for maybe a more rapid pour. I can hold the base plug in the melt with my nomax gloves but I always had to remove some dros from the plug and it cools when that happens. I guess I got to live with ultra high heat. I’ll report back.